Protests against tech giants and their impact on the San Francisco Bay Area economy just got personal.

According to an anonymous submission on local news site Indybay, an unknown group of protesters targeted a Google engineer best known for helping to develop the company’s self-driving car.

After arriving at the Berkeley home of Anthony Levandowski on Tuesday morning, the protesters distributed a flier (PDF) complaining of his role in developing Google Street View and, more recently, his spearheading a new condominium development in downtown Berkeley. Protesters say this development is linked to a design firm that has done work for the US military.

Ars' attempts to contact the anonymous group, which calls itself “counterforce,” were unsuccessful. Levandowski and Google also didn't respond to inquiries.

The protest against Levandowski came the same day that the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) voted for the first time to take action regulating Google, Facebook, Apple, and a number of other large tech companies that shuttle workers in private, Wi-Fi-enabled buses from San Francisco and the East Bay to points south in Silicon Valley.

A “cyber-capitalist utopia?”

Levandowski was profiled in a November 2013 article in The New Yorker (which, like Ars Technica, is owned by Condé Nast), detailing his daily 43-mile commute via a Google self-driving car from Berkeley to Mountain View.

“In rush-hour traffic, it can take two hours, but Levandowski doesn’t mind. He thinks of it as research,” the magazine reported.

Counterforce’s main complaint was that Google has recently acquired Boston Dynamics, a military robotics contractor, and that this fact, combined with Levandowski’s background in automated vehicles, is a frightening prospect. Beyond that, they wrote: “Anthony Levandowski is currently trying to create his own cyber-capitalist utopia in the great city of Berkeley," citing Levandowski's purchase of a property that he wants to develop into a 77-unit apartment building designed by the Nautilus Group.

Counterforce’s flyer includes paragraphs like these:

The Nautilus Group is composed of designers and builders who have created military installations, malls, and hospitals. Levandowski is now making his contribution to the further sterilization and gentrification of Downtown Berkeley and Shattuck Avenue.

The proposed project is a testament to the arrogance, disconnection, and luxury of the ruling class. Growing their own vegetables in a rooftop garden and selling them to other wealthy people allows them, somehow, to pretend that the planet is not being ravaged by the same economy they depend on for their wealth, comfort, and safety.

The flyer also includes passages that detail the engineer's morning routine in creepy detail:

Preparing for the action, we watched Levandowski step out of his front door. He had Google Glasses over his eyes, carried his baby in his arm, and held a tablet with his free hand. As he descended the stairs with the baby, his eyes were on the tablet through the prism of his Google Glasses, not on the life against his chest. He appeared in this moment like the robot he admits that he is.

There are men and women in the Congo, slaving away in giant pits in order to extract gold and other precious metals from the earth. This gold will go into phones and tablets made by companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Anthony Levandowski has never worked in a pit mine nor will his children. People like him are exempt from this type of degrading and exploitative labor. Instead, he can casually stare at his screens as if there was not human blood making this technology possible, as if there was not a life in his hands.

After protesting at his home for 45 minutes, the group marched to a Google bus pickup in South Berkeley and blocked it for about 30 minutes.

"We did get a call at 8:18 am from Google security saying that protesters were blocking a bus at the 3100 block of Adeline St. [at the Ashby BART station], but as we were arriving a BART Police officer had also arrived on the scene. Basically when we were pulling up on scene, there were approximately maybe 10 protesters in front of the bus. As we were approaching, the BART officer told them that they needed to disperse from the roadway. They got out of the roadway and dispersed, they complied. We didn’t have any other further reports or calls for service."

Officer Coats added that this was the first such anti-Google protest that she was aware of in Berkeley.

Protests heating up

The confrontation occurred against a backdrop of national press attention on the issue of shuttle buses used by tech companies like Google and Facebook to pick up San Francisco-based employees.

In recent months, the buses have again become a tangible lightning rod for people concerned about the impact that the tech boom has on the local economy (protests first began in 2008). In recent years, rents have skyrocketed regionally (especially in San Francisco), and prices continue to go up in many areas. In December 2013, some protesters attacked a Google bus in nearby Oakland. Others have responded by making miniature art.

Yesterday, a committee of San Francisco supervisors voted for a proposal in which the companies will have to pay $1 per day for each stop where passengers are picked up or dropped off. SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose told Ars that this measure won't take effect until approved by local voters later this spring.

Last week, in a survey (PDF) of 130 San Francisco-based Google commuters conducted by the University of California, Berkeley graduate students found that 40 percent of respondents said they would move out of San Francisco and somewhere closer to their job if the luxury bus program did not exist. The survey also found that respondents were overwhelmingly male (69 percent), unmarried (76 percent), renters (85 percent), and made over $100,000 or more (67 percent).

Promoted Comments

Singling out employees does not change corporate culture. Stalking and attacking individuals is a sure fire way to lose public support. And this odd fixation against self driving cars just strikes me as strange.

The moral? Don't bust your butt going to school, learning your craft, and developing products tailored to the demand signal in your industry, then dare to move somewhere were people who haven't done those things (or really, anything) live. They don't like that.

Claiming the people that live in these areas do "nothing" is precisely the sort of problem that Google is facing. There are a lot of people working jobs a lot more intensive than Google who make a lot less. While I tend to side more with Google employees here (it's not their fault they'd like to live within a reasonable distance to their job), this is precisely the sort of tone-deaf superiority complex that I'd imagine the protestors are pissed about.

Hint: just because your skills are rare doesn't mean you work harder than anybody else. Nor does it mean that you're better than them. And when people complain, insinuating that they are uneducated, or not doing "anything" isn't exactly a coherent response.

They aren't against car-pooling, they are against people who make good money buying/living in "their" neighborhood and jacking up rents/costs.

It's complete nonsense, and flies directly into the face of common sense.

Also the tech company buses have been using Muni's bus stops, slowing down the rest of San Francisco's mass transit.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If San Francisco's buses can maintain a schedule, then it should be fairly easy to schedule the tech buses for times the metro isn't there. I don't know how bad SF traffic is, but the tech buses are n(# of passengers) - b(# of buses) less cars on the road, which should be a good thing.

I think their view of what is a problem is that by the tech companies investing substantially in their own private mass transit system, rather than investing in the public mass transit system they are denying the public system resources that they could use to improve the standard of living for the whole city, not just for the tech company employees. I'm sure everyone who doesn't have a tech job at Google would appreciate WiFi on busses and all the additional routes and capacity that would exist for the public, if the busses were publicly accessible.

Public transit is supposed to come from tax revenue (property taxes, local sales taxes, etc.). Tech companies get some deserved ire for corporate tax shenanigans, but the employees most certainly pay income and property taxes. And in SF those aren't exactly trivial. So they chip in for the mass transit and don't use it. They also carpool to lighten their use of public roads. So, protesting an employee really doesn't make any sense.

Does anyone know how many people actually were at this protest? It's an "undisclosed number" here, and the post itself doesn't say. That they claim they were able to both block his house and then the bus stop, I assume it's at least a few people. But they don't mention anything about anyone trying to leave the house, nor if they actually blocked busses from picking people up. If this was just a couple people standing 3 feet into the street for 45 minutes, I am disappoint.

San Francisco has put limits on construction, building size, apartment density and they seem surprised that housing prices go through the roof.

SF's zoning policy is little more than "take money from the poor renters to give to rich property owners". The funny thing here though is that in the long term, the tech industry is way richer than everyone else. So if you're going to have a system where the richest decide who gets screwed over, in the long term it'll be the tech companies on top. People who support these policies (or who currently benefit) from them may way to think carefully about their long term prospects.

They aren't against car-pooling, they are against people who make good money buying/living in "their" neighborhood and jacking up rents/costs.

It's complete nonsense, and flies directly into the face of common sense.

Also the tech company buses have been using Muni's bus stops, slowing down the rest of San Francisco's mass transit.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If San Francisco's buses can maintain a schedule, then it should be fairly easy to schedule the tech buses for times the metro isn't there. I don't know how bad SF traffic is, but the tech buses are n(# of passengers) - b(# of buses) less cars on the road, which should be a good thing.

I think their view of what is a problem is that by the tech companies investing substantially in their own private mass transit system, rather than investing in the public mass transit system they are denying the public system resources that they could use to improve the standard of living for the whole city, not just for the tech company employees. I'm sure everyone who doesn't have a tech job at Google would appreciate WiFi on busses and all the additional routes and capacity that would exist for the public, if the busses were publicly accessible.

It's a few thousand people. It would add basically nothing to routes or capacity. Muni is already huge.

They aren't against car-pooling, they are against people who make good money buying/living in "their" neighborhood and jacking up rents/costs.

It's complete nonsense, and flies directly into the face of common sense.

Also the tech company buses have been using Muni's bus stops, slowing down the rest of San Francisco's mass transit.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If San Francisco's buses can maintain a schedule, then it should be fairly easy to schedule the tech buses for times the metro isn't there. I don't know how bad SF traffic is, but the tech buses are n(# of passengers) - b(# of buses) less cars on the road, which should be a good thing.

I think their view of what is a problem is that by the tech companies investing substantially in their own private mass transit system, rather than investing in the public mass transit system they are denying the public system resources that they could use to improve the standard of living for the whole city, not just for the tech company employees. I'm sure everyone who doesn't have a tech job at Google would appreciate WiFi on busses and all the additional routes and capacity that would exist for the public, if the busses were publicly accessible.

So their problem isn't that Google bought itself pie, their problem is that Google didn't buy everyone pie.

They aren't against car-pooling, they are against people who make good money buying/living in "their" neighborhood and jacking up rents/costs.

It's complete nonsense, and flies directly into the face of common sense.

Also the tech company buses have been using Muni's bus stops, slowing down the rest of San Francisco's mass transit.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If San Francisco's buses can maintain a schedule, then it should be fairly easy to schedule the tech buses for times the metro isn't there. I don't know how bad SF traffic is, but the tech buses are n(# of passengers) - b(# of buses) less cars on the road, which should be a good thing.

I think their view of what is a problem is that by the tech companies investing substantially in their own private mass transit system, rather than investing in the public mass transit system they are denying the public system resources that they could use to improve the standard of living for the whole city, not just for the tech company employees. I'm sure everyone who doesn't have a tech job at Google would appreciate WiFi on busses and all the additional routes and capacity that would exist for the public, if the busses were publicly accessible.

So you're basically saying that they should throw a bunch of money at a less efficient solution and then feel smug about themselves.

One key feature of American mass transit is how mind bogglingly awful it is. Throwing money at the local transit system would just be pissing it away. Wasting more money on something that's fundementally broken. On the other hand, any "private bus" solution shares the SAME EXACT GOALS with mass transit. When such a system succeeds, it renders similar benefits to the public at large.

Whining that a Google bus is not of sufficient benefit to the community is just retarded. It is actually the sort of "civic minded" behavior that these nit wits claim to value.

This is really misplaced class jealousy. I say misplaced because they are victimizing other members of the working class. They should be trying to build solidarity rather than encouraging antagonism and alienation.

They aren't against car-pooling, they are against people who make good money buying/living in "their" neighborhood and jacking up rents/costs.

It's complete nonsense, and flies directly into the face of common sense.

Also the tech company buses have been using Muni's bus stops, slowing down the rest of San Francisco's mass transit.

I fail to see why this is a problem. If San Francisco's buses can maintain a schedule, then it should be fairly easy to schedule the tech buses for times the metro isn't there. I don't know how bad SF traffic is, but the tech buses are n(# of passengers) - b(# of buses) less cars on the road, which should be a good thing.

I think their view of what is a problem is that by the tech companies investing substantially in their own private mass transit system, rather than investing in the public mass transit system they are denying the public system resources that they could use to improve the standard of living for the whole city, not just for the tech company employees. I'm sure everyone who doesn't have a tech job at Google would appreciate WiFi on busses and all the additional routes and capacity that would exist for the public, if the busses were publicly accessible.

So their problem isn't that Google bought itself pie, their problem is that Google didn't buy everyone pie.

They aren't against car-pooling, they are against people who make good money buying/living in "their" neighborhood and jacking up rents/costs.

It's complete nonsense, and flies directly into the face of common sense.

What's wrong with increasing property values? Hold out and let the property value increase and, when you're ready to sell, your investment has been very profitable.

Rents, of course, are another thing. But it's not like the property owner owns the property cost free. They still have taxes to pay among other costs. And, in CA, those taxes keep increasing without improved services or increased economy - except to raise the rent. And "the rent is d*** high."

Show me a property owner who can't increase rent, due to rent control, or to the property being in an undesirable area, and I'll show you an owner headed for slumlorddom, by way of no repairs or maintenance, and a property headed for blight...

I can see the point the protesters are making, and even agree to an extent, but showing up at an employee's house rather than company property seems like going over a line. Don't most of the people who dislike Google dislike the level of creepy-ass surveillance they perform? How is it not hypocritical to spy on this guy?

I mostly agree with you, but it is pretty clear many people don't. To play devil's advocate, I would argue that there are cases when it would be acceptable to show up at a company employee's house and protest outside. However, as 'targets', I would be thinking more about individuals who were in executive positions at financial institutions that deceived investors and broke the law while simultaneously destroying our economy, or the home of a company accused of dumping chemicals illegally, or the home of the CEO of BP (for example). Those particular individuals lied, broke the law, stole, destroyed lives and livelihoods out of greed and are, in general, just horrible examples of the human race.

I think these protesters probably think the 'evil' they see in Tony Levandowski is equal to (or maybe even greater than) the evil I think I see in the people I mentioned. I don't agree there, but haters gonna hate.

The fact that these protesters are creepily stalking the very person whose involvement with "surveillance, control and automation" is ironic and shows that there probably isn't a whole lot of self-reflection going on, regardless of their opinions.

And the thing these individuals may be overlooking is that by making it personal with Tony Levandowski, they are inviting the same treatment for themselves, aren't they?

Who are these protesters? Do they use the phrase "Scroogled" unironically? Something about this whole thing smells fishy.

For a start, go to ValleyWag and revel in awe at Sam Biddle's war on the tech workers of San Francisco. There's a post just about every day cheering on the protesters (also worth noting that Valleywag is headquartered in NYC, far from the shit stirring). Today's example: http://valleywag.gawker.com/protestors- ... 1505851154

Actually, that link answers someone else's question about how many protesters there were. Looks like 20-30.

And this odd fixation against self driving cars just strikes me as strange.

You'll have to excuse me, as I'll be blindly extrapolating, but I think the concern here is if you go get in your car, and drive yourself somewhere, really no one can tell where you're going to go unless you tell someone. So, if you have self driving car powered by Google, you tell it where you want to go and it drives you there. Now, Google has the information on where you went and when, and thus has more data to mine/sell/do whatever. They see this as a privacy matter, which is I can certainly understand.

In many ways that ship has sailed as most people carry a smartphone now which already provides enough information to track your location, for example most smartphones report on all the wireless APs they can see and their location to help the speed and accuracy of location lookups.

Stalking and attacking individuals is a sure fire way to lose public support.

I am not sure this is the case any more. Some of Anonymous' actions have shown that things can snowball on the Internet once there is a face and an individual person to target. eg, a petty dispute over a game can turn into hundreds of people sending pizzas and SWAT teams to your house, and your personal "dox" being plastered all over the internet. People seem to like targeting individual humans more than organizations or ideas.

I think that is a dangerous trend, so I hope that you are right.

Its a classic harassment and intimidation technique.

Politician: I do not advocate violence, but here is the exact home address of my political opponent whom I consider to be an enemy of the free world and I hope he dies.

Another Politician: All women seeking abortions must have their name and address publicly posted for the public to see.

Radical: I disagree with you, so I will publish all your personal details in the public domain and encourage people to take action against you.

In every case, they are attempting to intimidate people, if not outright insight violence or vandalism.

They see this as a privacy matter, which is I can certainly understand.

They don't see it as a privacy matter, they only talk about privacy for 3 sentences in a 2 page flyer. Their only complaint about self driving cars is DARPA's involvement with the idea and the "war robots" Boston Dynamics makes. Even then it is just used to portray Levandowski as a villain.Their biggest complaint is neither about privacy nor the military, it is a complaint about capitalism and Levandowski for gentrification.

Also the tech company buses have been using Muni's bus stops, slowing down the rest of San Francisco's mass transit.

Considering that they're taking the place of potentially dozens of cars, they're probably speeding up the mass transit, just not in a concrete way that people can easily visualize. They just see the extra few minutes at the stop, if that (all of the multi-bus locations near me have the buses just stop a little further back with little to no delay at all for simultaneous arrivals) and completely ignore the many delays that would be entailed were all those people to drive, instead.

Also I think Google Glass and its ability to record everyone's life without their knowing it (if used on a wide scale)

It fascinates me how many people hold up Google Glass as if the capability hasn't existed for the last 30 years, at least, and treat the company as though they introduced some new and insidious thing that had never existed before.

Jealousy at its pettiest and ugliest. If you don't like how your life turned out compared to someone else, then take some classes, get an education and sort your damn life out! Stop bitching because someone else is more successful than you. They probably had to work really hard for that success.

I understand the privacy issues. At the same time, I'd really like to see self-driving cars make it into the mainstream - in time for me when I reach my senior years. Having dealt with this myself and with cousins, it's really difficult when you have to tell your parents, "You need to stop driving." Self-driving cars would give seniors the mobility they crave without endangering others. There's even a place for monitoring, presuming the information is limited to the kids or other custodial designates.

Drunks are another good use, I hadn't thought of that one.

The Fast and the Furious would be hard to make in a world of self-driving cars.

I can not in any way see the point these protesters are trying to make. The whole bases of their protest is shortsighted, ignorant, and selfishly motivated. It comes down to them simply being jealous of what higher achieving people then themselves have. Those high achievers have worked hard and made good decisions throughout their lives, like what degrees to get in school and what career to pursue afterwards, to earn the things they have. Now the protesters, upset that they cannot have the same standard of living, because they didn't put in the effort, are trying to tear those they are jealous of down to their level, through whatever petty means possible.The bus stops are for "public" transportation and I would guess a good bit of public tax money goes into constructing and maintaining them. Tax money that comes in large part from those high achievers. The tech industry in SF is having a positive impact of the city. It is creating good, high paying jobs. Hindering the growth of the industry to serve the desires of people who are apparently failing to "earn their keep" is not a smart solution.

I overheard some SF NIMBY the other day complaining about how the Google buses "take up too much space on tight roads".

When I asked her how she might like the alternative of having everyone on the bus take their own vehicle to Mountain View from SF every day, further clogging the already abysmal freeway system here, she sneered. Point is, some people just like to complain. SF Bay Area NIMBYs do it more than anyone I've ever met in four continents.

Full disclosure:

I am a San Francisco "techie" and I commute to Silicon Valley M-F via Caltrain, which if you aren't aware is a heavy rail commuter train that spans from SF to San Jose. I don't own a car. I live in the Tenderloin and participate in my community, which is the most impoverished in SF and evictions are up 38% from last year in my hood. Point of this disclosure is to show how generalizations against one demographic are fucking stupid.

I understand the privacy issues. At the same time, I'd really like to see self-driving cars make it into the mainstream - in time for me when I reach my senior years. Having dealt with this myself and with cousins, it's really difficult when you have to tell your parents, "You need to stop driving." Self-driving cars would give seniors the mobility they crave without endangering others. There's even a place for monitoring, presuming the information is limited to the kids or other custodial designates.

Drunks are another good use, I hadn't thought of that one.

The Fast and the Furious would be hard to make in a world of self-driving cars.

I guess I wasn't thinking of ALL cars being self-driving, ALL the time. I would anticipate a mix of legacy and self-driving cars for quite a long time after their introduction. Come to think of it, I rather like what someone mentioned, sometimes setting the car to drive itself on the commute, so I could read or some such.

I've never seen any of the "Fast and Furious" movies, but I can believe a self-driving car wouldn't do any such stuff. What might be intersting is to put one of those drivers/cars doing its stuff on a road otherwise full of self-driving cars, then get the aerial view.

I read thru the entire thread as of this posting and did'nt find one person mention the question I've been wondering. Why has'nt Google and other companies gotten together with the SFMTA or VTA? For example, I know that VTA offers the EcoPass system, which you can read at http://www.vta.org/getting-around/fares/eco-pass , that companies in the South Bay can partner with in order to give their employees the use of the public transit system via their work. I'm not sure if the SFMTA offers something similar but with a big company like Google I'd think they would be onboard with something similar.

My main gripe with these buses is that they stop at PUBLIC TRANSIT stops and the public transit outfits do not see a dime from the use of those stops. So, for those of us who have to take said transit wind up with a double-slap. First, none of the companies listed are paying the public transit authorities for use of their stop. In addition to this the public transit system is losing money by these same people not using their services which shortchanges it for those of us who do use it. I mean, come on, they're using the EXACT same bus stops that VTA & SFMTA use so it's not like there is an accessibility issue here that I am seeing.

Second, you wind up with delays when their buses show up and prevent the normal buses from getting to the stop or people being able to board their bus. This causes additional hassles for those who are elderly or have limited mobility from getting onto the bus until the private one leaves. This also has an additive effect in that it delays those buses from departing/arriving on time which can make people late for either catching a connecting bus or train.

While I think it's severely creepy the level of effort these guys went thru to bring their point across the fact remains is that there are plenty of options for Google and other employees to get to work via public transit and the argument of them not being able to when they use the same stops just screams cheapskate to me. If you affect my ability to get to and from work to save yourself the $70 for a monthly VTA pass, and make it difficult for said public transit authorities to get improvements done to their system that benefit a greater majority, that's where I have a problem.

So, TLDR Google provided a shuttle service for employees therefore reducing the amount of commuter cars on the road and reducing overall traffic emissions and people protest calling it a luxury service?

That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Hey guys, if you want a nice bus service how about you complain to the people providing crappy public bus service? How is that not the logical conclusion?